Men with Guns: The Terminal List & The Old Man

The Terminal List, 2022, Amazon

The Old Man, 2022, FX -- download / Disney+

There is an inherent violence in me (more accurately, an attraction to...) that admires a man or woman with the skill & power, and the will power, to commit to violent acts in the protection of loved ones, or take vengeance should it be too late. For me, this normally involves swords, but guns will do. The problem is that the part of me that finds beauty & pathos in the violence ends up at odds with reality. You see, I have no desire to shoot a gun, let alone kill with one (OK, maybe it would be fun to go all six-shooter western gunfight on a watermelon) and there is a subset of humanity that truly aspires to be Men With Guns.

As Marmy said, there are those saying that The Terminal List is a Republican / Right-Wing fantasy. And that rings unbelievably true. A military man, who based on the little character building they do (and without explicitly including his politics) would be a strong Republican (or maybe that is the problem with the current divide, that I [a Canadian] would make that judgement call without it being played out) based on his values and cultural fine notes. But, he would be, in my Liberal view point, the shining example of what it is to be Republican, a manly man, without being misogynist, who likes his guns (but dutifully locks them up) and taking his daughter (!!!) hunting, instead of the raving Floridian that the current pop culture  -- our current representation of Right vs Left in the US and Canada is more pop culture than it is reality -- depicts. And despite the current growing rhetoric of anti-government activity in the US, this man loves his country despite themselves.

James Reece (Chris Pratt, Jurassic World) leads a SEAL team into a Syrian compound to take out a nefarious bio-terrorist from Iran. I think. These villains all blur together in these films/series. But it matters naught, as the whole op is a ploy to kill off Reece's team. There are unexpected IEDs planted, and before they can bypass them, they are ambushed. And his whole team is blown to bits, with him barely being pulled out in time. Did they fuck up the op, did one of his team freak out and trigger the explosives, did they get fed bad intel? All of this ambiguity is the most interesting part of this whole series, as Reece truly does have gaps in his memory, truly does wonder if something is wrong with him, and we do wonder if he is a broken man just reacting badly to his damaged brain.

But eventually that turns out to be only part of it, and he is being framed by greater forces. His wife & daughter are murdered to frame him, corporations are trying to profit on the deaths of his team mates, and the government is wrapped up in it. But its not as easily played out as one would expect. Alas, I am not sure this is done to have an intricate plot, or to just stretch the story out into a series. Eventually, really eventually, things do play out as one would expect in these kind of stories. Allies are enemies, enemies are cowards, friends are almost always the last enemy to be found out. And people are killed. Lots of people are killed. Illegally, flagrantly and without much worry for collateral damage -- a concept that you know bugs me.

Is Pratt good in this series? Given he is a one-note character forced through the eye of a needle, maybe? There is none of the wise-cracking Pratt from other roles, as Reece is not only horribly traumatized by what he went through in Syria, but that trauma is continually extended by the murder of his family and what he does in response. He is damaged mentally, and has physical symptoms that continually play out as waking dreams and massive head aches. And he is continually enabled by the opportunistic and like-minded (return violence with violence) people he surrounds himself by. If the metaphor is that the US creates killing machines, and then forgets them, then yes Pratt does a good job of displaying the machine.

In The Old Man we are presented with the standard template of Aging Assassin characters and the people usually surrounding them. But as the story further unfolded, I was surprised as they became less and less the focuses, and supporting characters stepped forward to tell the real story. The trailers for this depicted a typical poke-the-bear retired assassin story, where in the government sends people to bring in Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart), an American CIA operative who has been in hiding for 30 years. And it doesn't go well, and his old handler (John Lithgow, The Accountant) warns the government operatives that they don't know how terrible the wrath they have unleashed is. There are elements of the trailer in the show, but that's not it, at all.

For one, there is the timing. Thirty years ago was the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the CIA backing of the various mountain warlords to fight against the Russians, without the US getting directly involved in the action. The warlords became what we know as The Taliban. One such warlord became a world power, so much so that when he asks the US to find Dan Chase, 30 years later, they do, without question. The old handler, Harold Harper, is now a director at the FBI and is tasked as a consultant, but at the same time warns Chase, so as to leave whatever happened all those years ago, buried in the dust. Meanwhile, he also approaches a shadowy figure (Joel Grey, Oz) to hire his own assassin. Harper would rather Chase dead, than captured by his own government. Whatever the secret that could be uncovered is, it has him making (more) questionable choices.

But really, all that turns out not to be what makes the show good, possibly one of the best I have seen this year. Background characters are setup as wooden -- the woman Dan Chase takes captive so she doesn't reveal him, but also to protect her; the young woman who is Harper's spunky ally, but turns out to be Dan Chase's daughter; the memory of Dan Chase's late wife, who was MUCH more than she let anyone know -- they are all typical background characters who have the gall to step out of the background and become more important players than the main male actors. Its spectacular, once you see that begin to play out!

There is action, as one would expect from a series like this, but the real meat is in the conversations. Of course, Lithgow is a man to deliver great dialogue, but the sharpness with which Zoe (Amy Brenneman, The Leftovers) emerges from being Chase's captive into her own person, is divine, the beleaguered divorcee convincing herself, and Chase, of her value. Meanwhile the men are dragged along by the vagaries and drives of their egos, trapped in who they believe they are and who they have to be. The women have agency, the men are character templates.

If anything, the show ended too quickly, in that it was just beginning to capture its own essence when... the season ended.

Two shows about men of violence, presented in very different manners. One provides exactly what it sets out to provide, not straying far from expectations (while expecting you to be surprised), where one takes said expectations and sets them aside for the more interesting story, where one questions the point of the violence.